Doing the Couch to 5K with my daughter

I am not a runner, I never have been.  I used to row many years ago and had to run as part of my training but I never ever found it easy and did a combination of walking and running (apparently this is called ‘jeffing’). Although I probably walked more than I ran.

Problems with my back stopped me from any attempts to run years ago and after that I pretty much stopped doing any exercise at all.

I blogged recently about how lockdown changed that, thanks to the PE lessons with Joe Wicks and discovered that I could do exercise and that it didn’t make my back any worse which was great. My daughter is starting middle school next week and about half way through lockdown, we were talking about the new school and she admitted that one of the things that was worrying her was the cross country.  She is used to doing sport at school and had to do some running, but at middle school, there is more running and the course is longer.

I could see why that would worry her as she isn’t a big fan of running either. I gave it some thought and then I showed her the Couch to 5K app.  I explained how it worked and how it built up over time and suggested that we give it a try.  We had the time back then to do 2-3 runs a week and I suggested we give it a go at our own (very slow) pace and see if we could build up our running stamina.

I was amazed when she agreed and we downloaded the apps to our phones and fired up our music playlists and booked in our first run.

There are quite a few Couch  to 5K style apps out there, some free, some with payment options and so after doing some research I chose the Public Health England app called One You  Couch to 5K as it seemed pretty user friendly and was completely free.

It is so easy to set up, you choose your goals and decide which trainer you want to motivate you as you run.  You can choose from Sarah Millican, Laura, Jo Whiley, Sanjeev Kohli or Micheal Johnson.  I chose Sarah Millican and I love her voice.  They talk to you about each stage of your running, start you off, and tell you how long you have run for or have left at different intervals.

The running itself is split into 9 weeks.  Each set of runs starts with a 5 minute warm-up walk and to begin with you run for so long and walk in between to help you build up your stamina. The first run is running for 60 seconds and walking for 90 seconds which you do nine times.

I won’t lie to you, that first run is really tough. I thought I was quite fit, especially as I had been doing the PE with Joe classes every day but that first run was really hard.  We made the mistake of running on the roads the first time, that does make it harder.  The second run we decided to run around a field near our house and that was a lot easier.

For the first few weeks, you do the same running pattern for the three runs.  The aim is to do these three runs within a week, at least a day apart. Each week then increases the amount of time you run for. It is a really good system and looking back to the first couple of runs now, I can’t believe how far I am now able to run.

We haven’t finished the program, far from it.  There are 9 weeks of running and at the end, the aim is to be able to run 5K of course, and to run for 30 minutes without stopping.

I think we have been doing it for a lot longer than 9 weeks but the beauty of using an app like this is that you can pace yourself.  My daughter often asked if she could repeat a week as she wasn’t feeling confident and that was fine. If you have a day where you are not feeling like running a constant distance, you can dip back a week or two and do an ‘easier’ run.  I have enjoyed that aspect of it.

I decided to carry on and I am now half way through week 6.  I have done two 20 minute runs and a  25 minute one, admittedly very slowly, but I could never have imagined at the beginning that I would be able to run for five minutes, so I am really proud of myself.  My daughter is on week 5 and is happy to carry on running three lots of 5 minutes for the time being.  That is fine with me, that is still 15 minutes of good exercise that she is doing and she feels happier that she can now run for longer periods of time.  Hopefully, this will give her a bit of confidence and less dread when her turn to do cross country comes around.

I’m not the first person to do Couch to 5K but I wanted to share my experience as it has been so positive and I now quite enjoy running, words I NEVER thought I would hear myself say.  But it is also a great thing to do with the kids too to get them out and doing some exercise and they don’t have to take it too seriously if they don’t want to. And who knows, maybe I will eventually get to 5K?  I will keep you posted.